Indicators

The main implementation item of the Highlands Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP) is for the District to regularly conduct measurements of selected statistics in order to determine if the District is achieving its sustainability goals over time. By doing this, the District can either maintain its course of actions or change course to improve its success on achieving its vision of sustainability. These regular and selected measurements are called, “indicators.”

the most notable improvement was the vacancy rate for fire fighters. This indicator expresses the percentage of unfilled fire fighter positions, thus the higher the number, the less fire fighters on the Highlands Volunteer Fire Department. This indicator improved from 70% in 2012 to 29.6% in 2014.

Overall, most changes are minor.

In some cases, there is no change:

For some of the indicators, this is simply a result of no direct change from 2012 to 2014.

For other indicators, this is due to lack of available data. For example, this is the case with indicators that required data from either the National Household Survey or the Community Energy and Emissions Inventory. The former does not have an equivalent for later data, and the latter has not been updated since 2012.

Further in regards to the National Household Survey: Because there was no equivalent later data for the 2014 report, some of the results are the same as in the 2012 report. These are the indicators that used the 2011 National Household Survey. In all cases where this data was used in the 2012 report, the year 2012 was cited, when in fact the year 2011 should have been cited to reflect the actual date of data collection. This has been corrected in the 2014 report.

In regards to the indicator, “Unlawful Incidents,” staff decided to use a more readily available data source than that used for the 2012 report. The same data for previous years is provided in the 2014 report in order to provide a proper comparison.It is anticipates the 2016 report to be completed later this year, realistically the last quarter.

The 2012 Indicators Report is the first or baseline reporting year. The District expects to produce successive reports every two years, comparing and building on previous years.

The Indicators Collection Guide provides the background to the project, web links, contact information and other sources for data collection. It is intended as the main "how to" document for future indicator collection projects.